Jeanette Winterson (post 4): Does she refer to adoptive mother as “Mrs Winterson,” “my mother,” and “Mrs W,” because they both had multiple personality?

In her memoir, Jeanette Winterson refers to her father as “dad,” not as “Mr W” or “Mr Winterson.” Yet she refers to the woman who raised her since infancy as “Mrs Winterson,” “my mother,” and “Mrs W,” in approximately that order of frequency. Sometimes she refers to her in all three ways on the same page (1, pp. 45, 103).

What do the following two passages mean?

“But it was Christmas and the school was lit up and Mrs Winterson was in her fur coat and bird hat and my dad was washed and shaved and I was walking in between them and it felt normal.

“ ‘Is that your mum?’ said somebody.

“ ‘Mostly,’ I said” (1, p. 98).

“Years later, when I came back to Accrington after my first term at Oxford, it was snowing…I looked at her through the window…She was my mother. She wasn’t my mother” (1, p. 99).

These two passages might be thought to refer to the distinction between her adoptive mother and her birth mother (whom she meets at the end of the memoir) or to her ambivalent feelings about her adoptive mother. But the curious multiplicity of the ways that she refers to her adoptive mother throughout the memoir suggests another interpretation.

The author’s alternate personalities may have differed from each other in how they saw their relationship with that woman. For example, one may have viewed her as “my mother,” while another one may not have seen herself as this woman’s daughter, making her “Mrs Winterson.”

Another explanation for Jeanette’s use of multiple names for the woman would be that the woman, herself, had multiple personality, and Jeanette had a different name for each of the woman’s personalities.

It is possible that both women had multiple personality.

1. Jeanette Winterson. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? New York, Grove Press, 2011.